Sasqquatch hunting on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River may not be the usual first step to a summer of exploring the farthest reaches of the Trans Canada Trail in Alberta, but that’s just what Sheila Thompson was doing last week when she visited Heinsburg Community School.
Thompson is no stranger to that school, she taught there in 2006, when all of northern Alberta was engrossed in the Edmonton Oilers’ Run for the Cup. She also is a good friend and former mentor to Heinsburg’s principal, Carmen McLeod, dating back to McLeod’s first year of teaching.
Thompson told a group of high school students that while 2006 was a special year for Alberta, next year, 2017, will be an even greater year for the whole of Canada, as the nation celebrates its Sesquicentennial, or 150th birthday. What would be a good present for the nation, she asked, and reminded the students they have a whole year to think about it.
A group across Canada has a great idea, she noted: the Trans Canada Trail (TCT), a trail system that reaches all three of the oceans that surrounds three sides of the nation. “The Iron Horse Trail is part of it, and we have a head start on it. My idea starts right here, today,” she told them. “Here is where a lot of Alberta started, right along the trail and the North Saskatchewan River. There are 3,000 km of Trans Canada Trail in Alberta, and it starts right here.”
She told the students of her plans to travel to all four gateways where the TCT enters the province during the summer and to keep a blog of her adventures en route. The actual trek, she told them, would start the following day on the Saskatchewan border just south of Onion Lake, where Alberta, Saskatchewan, Onion Lake First Nation and the North Saskatchewan meet.
The Iron Horse Trail, one of three branches of the TCT’s land route in Alberta, doesn’t reach the border, due to problems obtaining land for the trail between the border and Heinsburg. “It will be up to your generation to make the land link,” she told them. “I think your generation will make it happen.”
The similarity of the word ‘Sesquicentennial’ to ‘sasquatch’ caught Thompson’s imagination early on, and led to her obtaining a very interesting traveling companion, a miniature sasquatch named Aussie, who originally came from Australia. She introduced Aussie to both the high schoolers and to Daniel Peterson’s Grade 4 class, and invited the younger group to join her on a sasquatch hunt, with one lucky student donning a sasquatch costume and beating its way through the bushes to peer shyly out at the students.
On Saturday, Thompson traveled to the border location, where she was sent on her journey blessed with a prayer and an honour song by an Onion Lake elder and two singers, with Denise Tournier of Duck Lake, SK, singing O Canada in English, French and Cree as part of the ceremony.
The sasquatch also came along for the ride on Sunday, when Thompson, her husband Jim Hawkins, and Edmonton friends Rose and Boyd Oberhoffner canoed east from Elk Point’s Riverside Campground to Fort George and Buckingham House Historic Site and rode back to Elk Point on their bicycles, which Thompson said was “a perfect start to the tour. We have the best section of trail in the province.”